If you are looking to buy a home then great deals will abound. Take your time – prices should remain flat even where some markets are ‘hot’.

If you have well defined skills useful in consulting, starting a small business or have skills of value in your community — with low overhead costs — then 2010 may be when you want to consider self-employment. But don’t quit your day job unless you have to. Experiment.

Salaries should remain stable, unless you change your job. Look for new hires to be offered 5-10% less; salaries in these areas should be remain stable and may actually increase 5%in ND, NE, SD, UT, and VA. One analysis shows jobs growing at the rate of 150-200,000 per month between March and June 2010; this is too positive for me, my expectation is that job losses will continue but slow (more on that later).

Professionals going back to school, and able to demonstrate continued growth in skillsets and industry knowledge will be in demand. EDUCATION IS IMPORTANT. Throughout the entire recession, those will BA/BS degrees still enjoy a less than 6% unemployment rate — meaning that most people that want a job can find one within 2-6 weeks.

The Great Recession has been/will be hard on those that are young (under 30) and poorly educated.

The labor market will continue to reward age over youth, except where age thinks too highly of itself and prices itself out of consideration. In highest demand: those with crossover skills in I.T., education, medical and ‘enterprise’ systems.

==========
Economics
==========

2010 will be the calm before the storm. Things will seem to get somewhat better by March or April 2010: unemployment will drop to 9.8%; GDP for 1Q will be around 3.1%, and the price of energy and gold will remain where they are at now ($74-79/barrel; $1125/oz).

Stability will extend into 2Q 2010 as well.

3Q will be jittery. Credit will tighten. Unemployment will edge up back towards 10.5% (official rate; 17.4% unofficial). "The Debt" will be Washington’s primary topic of discussion as approximately $1.7 trillion is due for payout in October. The money will not be there. Treasury note sales in 1Q/2Q/3Q will be weak, raising barely half of the money being offered in T-Notes. The Treasury will turn to the Fed to tighten lending so dollars will not be lent via the Reserve to banks and the unlent dollars will go to servicing the national debt.

Bad news: it just won’t be enough. The stock market shouldn’t dive but even the biggest banks will be in trouble. Obama will not bail them out. With impending elections in November he will call for taking responsibility for your actions and let the banks fail. This will give him and the Democrats a large measure of election protection as this is the very thing that Republicans have been calling for since Fall of 2008. They will get their wish. And they will get the blame. President Obama will point out that even if he wanted to save the banks again that he couldn’t get Republican support so now is the time for banks to take responsibility for having returned TARP money from the 2008 bailout. He and the Democrats will take great heat but the Republicans will get most of the blame.